What analytical challenges does a business face and how to solve them?

According to Allied Market Research, the business intelligence software market will reach approximately 177 billion dollars – this is almost 3 times higher than in 2020. At the same time, NewVantage Partners said that in 2023 91.9% organizations have realized tangible benefits from investing in data and analytics. In this article we will tell you why analytics is useful for business and what problems it solves.

Product optimization by understanding user experience

User behavior analysis is needed to understand why people use a product less and to track successful solutions that attract more interest to a product or service. For this purpose it is estimated:

Which product features are most popular and which are used less frequently.
What updates increase sales?
How quickly do people make purchasing decisions?
How often customers use the product.

For example, you can analyze the experience of interacting with mobile software using the following algorithm:

Select a service to track user actions in the application. Platforms such as AppMetrica or Firebase are suitable for this.
Set a baseline for monitoring. This could be engagement rate, number of sessions, or monetization metrics.
Design an event map. For example, to calculate the conversion to an order, you will need to track the fact of payment for each transaction with reference to a specific client.
Create dashboards based on selected metrics. Most often, BI systems are used for this. In some cases, downloads from Excel or Google spreadsheets are sufficient to work with them, but for large-scale tasks, more advanced data warehouses may be required.

By understanding users’ attitudes towards a product, companies will be able to assess what is best to change in a product or service, what audience to advertise to, and how to optimize their marketing strategy.

Selecting effective marketing channels

Assessing the productivity of marketing channels determines which advertising tools bring in the most customers and which simply waste the company's money. Here it is important to determine the goals of the marketing campaign and select the appropriate metrics for them. For example, when increasing sales, it is better to track customer acquisition cost (CAC), conversion and return on investment (ROI), and to increase brand awareness – reach, frequency and CTR.

Once all the goals and metrics are defined, data on advertising effectiveness is collected through various marketing tools. For example:

Google Analytics or Yandex Metrica, which tracks visits to the site, conversion and user behavior.
CRM systems (Bitrix24, amoCRM) that show interactions with customers, sales history and help analyze the effectiveness of each operation.
Marketing platforms (Yandex.Direct, Google Ads, VK Advertising, MyTarget) that launch advertising campaigns on the Internet, measure their results and evaluate user reactions.
SMS and email services (NotiSend, Unisender), which automatically send letters and SMS, and also track how users interact with them.

As soon as the first results begin to arrive, the company will be able to build a comparative report for each channel on key indicators such as CAC, ROI and conversions. In addition, this will allow you to compare the cost of acquiring a customer with their LTV – for example, if a channel attracts expensive but not very profitable customers, it may be worth abandoning it.

This approach will help you choose the most productive channels to attract customers and significantly save the company’s budget.

Identifying problems in team work

Analysis of management KPIs helps track the performance of individual employees or entire departments of the company. Using analytics, you can evaluate revenue per employee, the number of tasks completed, deadlines met, and other indicators that affect overall business results.

Typically, team productivity data is collected using the following platforms:

Time and productivity trackers (Toggl, Hubstaff) that record time spent on specific tasks.
Project management systems (Trello, Jira, Asana) that track task progress and deadlines.
CRM systems (Bitrix24, Salesforce) that store information about sales and interactions with customers.
HRM systems (SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, BambooHR), which are used to manage employee data, including working hours, vacations and productivity.

In addition, these services can be integrated with a BI system. This will allow you to create dashboards that display data on employees, groups and departments in real time – all this will significantly speed up the process of obtaining information.

With the help of timely assessment of KPIs of employees, companies will be able to timely assess deviations from schedules, immediately respond to declines in performance, and also compare the results of work of different teams.

Optimization of data processing and content

Data optimization is especially important for companies that work with large volumes of information and also have many departments, branches or business partners. In such cases, manual processing and analysis of data is virtually impossible, so to optimize work with corporate information, it is better to use BI systems in combination with powerful data warehouses. This solution provides businesses with the following benefits:

Centralized storage and access to data from different sources.
Automation and increasing the speed of information processing.
Identifying systemic business problems.
Real-time data visualization.
Scalability and adaptation to business changes.

For example, to optimize data processing for more than 70,000 samples per day, a large diagnostic center implemented an analytical system based on Modus BI with the connection of ClickHouse and Modus ETL. This made it possible to structure more than 2 billion samples by site, priority, type of study and 14 other indicators. In this system, PostgreSQL served as the operating core – it prepared data and sent it to ClickHouse, which significantly accelerated the entire BI system. As a result, information for six months from 500 million+ rows weighed up to 12 GB – which is 10 times less than when using a less powerful DBMS.

Acceleration of business processes

Reducing the time spent analyzing data helps companies make decisions faster and identify problems and deviations in production. and improve customer service. Fast analytics provides:

Optimization of business processes. Fast data collection and reporting help speed up production, logistics and other business processes.
Improving Marketing Effectiveness. Timely reporting allows marketers to quickly assess the success of campaigns and, if necessary, make adjustments to them faster.
Improved management. The company's management and managers quickly become familiar with key business indicators and timely think through a resource allocation plan.

Thus, the aforementioned combination of Modus BI+ClickHouse+Modus ETL helped to significantly reduce the processing time of low-aggregate data – a dashboard with 500 million+ records was compiled in just 5 seconds. At the same time, the use of ETL and the Data Marts segment placed less load on the accounting system.

This made it possible to record and display basic metrics on a single dashboard, and highly detailed information about clients on ten more information panels. The system also helped speed up the search for the causes of defects and improve monitoring of the quality of the company’s service.

Conclusion

Data analytics is a critical tool for improving business performance. It helps companies optimize their processes, increase marketing efficiency, monitor employee KPIs and perform other internal tasks.